Homemade Pizza Crust 3 Ways and a KitchenAid Stand Mixer Giveaway

by Angie McGowan on May 2, 2012

We’ve been making homemade pizza in my family for as long as I can remember. It was a tradition started by my mother when I was a little girl. Every Saturday night was our pizza night. Today I continue that tradition with my family, making our own homemade pizza from scratch almost every weekend.

For my family, the crust is the most important part of the pizza. The pizza crust can definitely make or break your pizza. I’ve tried lots of little tips and tricks to try and continually improve my pizza dough over the years. And after all the little tricks I’ve tried, my favorite way to improve pizza dough is by adding more flavor to the crust itself.

Along with olive oil and honey, I always add onion and garlic powder to my crust. Just a little goes a long way, and makes my pizza crust taste wonderful. I also make sure to use sea or kosher salt in my crust.

Recently I also started adding herbs. This makes my pizza crust so incredibly good. You can use dry or fresh herbs. In the pizza below, I added dried basil to the pizza dough and then stuffed the crust with mozzarella string cheese. I then simply topped it with cheese and pepperoni.

I tear my string cheese in half lengthwise before stuffing it into the crust. This creates a stuffed crust with a small amount of delicious cheese, but without all the greasy cheese ooze of some other cheese stuffed crusts.

For this pizza crust, I added a mix of dried Italian herbs (basil, oregano and rosemary). Then I used butter instead of olive oil in the crust, and brushed the crust with more melted butter after it came out of the oven. For the toppings, we used my son’s favorite, peperoni and olives.

This pizza crust is rosemary garlic. I simply added dry rosemary with olive oil to my pizza crust. Then for the toppings we added fresh mozzarella and roma tomatoes and garnished with fresh basil.

For all the crusts above, I made them thin, taking the recipe as it’s written below and dividing it in half to make two pizzas.

Directions:

Combine warm water, yeast, honey, salt, onion and garlic powder in your stand mixer. Mix until yeast dissolves. Add herbs (Italian blend, basil or rosemary) and butter or olive oil. Turn mixer to low and add flour until dough starts to pull away from bowl. Knead for about 10 minutes. Dough should be sticky and smooth. Grease a large metal bowl with olive oil. Form dough into a ball and transfer to bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and a towel. Let rise about 2 hours in a warm place, or until dough doubles in size. Punch down, from into a ball again and let rise again until it doubles in size.

Preheat oven to it's highest temperature. For thin crust, divide dough in half and roll out pizza crust to the size of pizza pan or stone. For a thicker, traditional crust use all the dough and stretch out with hands and roll until it's the size of a large pizza pan.

If you are stuffing the crust, place the string along the edges of the crust and roll the crust over the cheese, and seal the dough.

Pre-bake crust in oven set at it's highest baking temperature (mine is 550°) until crust is lightly golden. Remove crust from oven.

Spoon over pizza sauce (I use either a quality jarred pizza sauce or homemade). Layer cheese and your favorite toppings.

Bake pizza again at your oven's highest temperature until cheese is lightly browned.

Brush pizza crust with olive oil or butter after baking if desired.

For making the pizza dough, I’ve been using the same 6 quart KitchenAid® Stand Mixer for years. It’s one of my best friends in the kitchen. But when I got the opportunity to test out this big new KitchenAid beauty, I couldn’t pass it up.

I couldn’t’ believe how much quieter and more powerful this mixer was than my 6-quart model. Before, you couldn’t hear the television when I turned on my mixer because it was so loud. But this new high powered motor on the 7-quart is so quiet.

I also love the bowl capacity, you can make a ton of bread dough in there. And the motor is powerful and heavy enough, the mixer won’t try to jump off your counter when its kneading your dough.

And now time for the giveaway!

To enter to win one of these fabulous mixers for yourself, along with the accessories shown, just leave a comment below telling me what your favorite pizza topping is.

Winner must be over 18 and a United States resident. I apologize to my international readers! Giveaway ends May 10 at midnight. Winner will be chosen by Random.org and announced the following morning. Winner has 48 hours to respond, or another winner will be chosen.

KitchenAid provided me with a stand mixer for review. All opinions are 100% my own.

My favorite pizza topping is homemade italian sausage, made with a healthy dose of ground toasted fennel seed. I have a red kitchenaid which I LOVE, but would love to upgrade to this heftier model. Alas, hubby has been laid off (“early retired”), so will never be able to afford it for myself.

My name is Angie and I’m so glad you’ve stopped by my little corner of the web. Eclectic Recipes is my personal food blog where I share the recipes from my kitchen. I absolutely love spending time in the kitchen cooking, baking and developing recipes for family and friends. (read more)